International students are paying for their work to be proofread, edited and, in some cases, written entirely, by professional writers and agencies, raising concerns around issues of support and plagiarism.
"Most students who ask me for a quotation are from outside the UK and English is their second language," says Louise Harnby, who has been a professional proofreader since 2005. "Many of them simply don't have the access to sufficient language-support services at their university."
Harnby says she has experienced an increase in the number of foreign students seeking proofreading support, which she says is in line with the rise in the number of international students studying in the UK – a trend recently proved to be unstable, with figures from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (Hefce) showing the UK experienced a fall in the total number of international students for the first time in 29 years in 2013.